eli5: What is a virtual machine?
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It’s a computer like any other but instead of having its own physical parts it borrows/uses the ones from the “host” computer (the one where the virtual machine is running). So instead of having a physical hard drive to store information or a CPU to process it a portion of the physical parts is allocated to the host and a portion goes to the virtual machine. The benefit is that you can “destroy” the virtual machine with viruses, delete it and create another one without damaging your own computer. In a nutshell it’s a computer but physical parts are virtual. The only downside is that if your computer (host) isn’t very powerful the virtual machine is likely to be laggy as the RAM (working memory) is shared betwen your computer and the vm so you can’t run that many programs in parallel.
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